The European Anti-Fraud Office, or OLAF, thinks it should be the one investigating. After all, what’s the point of having a dedicated EU anti-fraud agency if you can’t investigate credible allegations that MEPs are taking bribes?

But what remains unclear is whether the traditional centre-left can capitalise on the faltering conservatives. If recent evidence is any indication, it’s not a clear-cut trade-off at all. Indeed, in eurozone countries where governments have either recently fallen or are likely to do so soon – Ireland, Portugal and Finland – centre-right parties are ascendant. Read more

A new research note by Giles Moec, the head of European economic research at Deutsche Bank, nicely encapsulates the stakes facing Lisbon and summarises much of what we were hearing on the sidelines of last week’s summit – namely, that it would be in Portugal’s interest to take a bail-out, but the political turmoil may make it impossible.

As Moec notes, the date to watch is April 15, when the Portuguese government has about €4.3bn in outstanding debt it must refinance. With Portugal’s 10-year bonds hitting another euro-era high of 7.9 per cent on Monday – well above the 7 per cent the government has said it can handle – that April deadline is looking rather expensive. Read more

European Union leaders agreed to set up a permanent bail-out mechanism for troubled eurozone economies after 2013. Lex’s John Authers and Vincent Boland discuss whether the measures can solve the problems facing the eurozone. Read more

Day one of the European Union summit finally broke up after midnight Friday, with leaders finalising the structure of a new eurozone bail-out system that will go into place in 2013 and some tough language on Libya, including the promise to push for more sanctions against Libyan oil and gas companies.

Most everything else in the much-anticipated “grand bargain” to shore up the eurozone was decided before the summit, so the rest of the conclusions on economic and fiscal issues were widely reported and expected.

One thing worth reflecting on, however, is the fact that what was once one of the most contentious proposals to reform the EU’s economic governance – new budget rules that allow the EU to fine wayward member states – was agreed to without much controversy. That may require Brussels elites to reconsider the Hungarian presidency. Read more

Portugal’s prime minister has resigned on the eve of a European Union summit that is supposed to move towards a “grand bargain” to bolster the eurozone and strengthen its crisis prevention ability. The currency bloc is in a bind. Lex’s Edward Hadas and Vincent Boland discuss just how bad it is and what might come next. Read more

The Liberal Democrats chose the elegant Palais D’Egmont for their pre-summit gathering. While the leafy grounds are gorgeous – particularly on a very un-Belgian sunny day – the mood was anxious. Read more

Until Portugal imploded, most of the focus of the two-day summit was expexted to be on the new Irish prime minister Enda Kenny, who failed to secure a cut in Dublin’s bail-out loans during an emegency gathering two weeks ago. Read more

The pre-summit caucuses of leaders in their party groupings have begun, and one of the surprise guests at the centre-right European Peoples’ Party meeting is Pedro Passos Coelho, the head of Portugal’s opposition Social Democrats and the country’s likely next prime minister. Read more

As we’ve been reporting for the last couple of days, many of the fiscal measures that we once thought had been agreed for the two-day summit are unravelling, thanks in part to Finland’s objections to finalising an increase in the eurozone’s €440bn bail-out fund and Germany’s sudden objection to the structure of the €500bn fund that will replace it in 2013. Read more

But those of us without the benefit of a security detail and Belgian motorcycle outriders will have to deal with something far more onerous: thousands of Belgian demonstrators who are expected to clog Brussels’ city centre to protest European austerity measures and the failure of Belgian political leaders to form a government.

A quick morning wander through the city’s EU quarter reveals Belgian security forces armed to the teeth, complete with gas masks, body armour, riot helmets and plexiglass shields. Helicopters buzz overhead. Two Belgian army soldiers were even spotted wandering through the atrium of Justis Lipsius, the EU building where the summit is held. Read more

Who is having a good crisis over at the European commission’s Belaymont headquarters?

Probably not Gunther “Apocalypse” Oettinger, the energy commissioner, whose dire remarks about the Japanese nuclear situation were an embarrassing example of publicly pouring fuel on an unstable reactor. Not Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, whose aide told reporters that a no-fly zone over Libya was both impractical and unwise – only to be overruled a short time later by Britain and France.

While it is still early days, the buzz among eurocrats is that one commissioner who has proved effective in these troubled times is Bulgaria’s Kristalina Georgieva. Read more

The European commission has asked member states to begin testing imported Japanese food for increased radiation levels, although officials believe that health risks for consumers are low.

That assessment is based on the fact that Japanese agricultural exports to the European Union are limited to begin with – particularly from the affected regions. Moreover, the disruption and devastation from the earthquake and tsunami are likely to reduce those exports even further. Read more

Beleaguered Japanese officials are already grappling with a humanitarian crisis wrought by a biblical earthquake and tsunami, and the prospect of apocalyptic meltdowns at a pair of stricken nuclear reactors. Add to their list of woes one European commissioner.

That would be Gunther Oettinger, the energy commissioner, whose ill-judged remarks about the crisis on Wednesday have helped to make a bad situation worse. Read more

It will be Luxembourg that will have the final say on Brussels versus Strasbourg, now that Paris has decided to sue under Lisbon.

In other words, the fight over the seat of the European Parliament has suddenly become a full-blown EU inter-institutional brawl.

The French government on Tuesday decided to take the European Parliament to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg after parliamentarians last week decided to tweak the terms of their regular commute between Brussels and Strasbourg. Paris claims the move violates the EU’s new Lisbon treaty, its governing constitution. Read more

Moody’s decision to downgrade Spain’s sovereign credit rating from Aa1 to Aa2 was very unwelcome to the Spanish government yesterday, but it may have come as a timely reminder to other European leaders, meeting in Brussels today, that they are still a very long way from solving the sovereign debt crisis. Ever since the beginning of the year, the markets have been willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the European negotiators, believing that the Germans and the French had finally come to the view that some form of fiscal burden sharing was a better alternative, for themselves as well as for the troubled economies, than the risk of sovereign defaults, or worse still the break up of the euro. Read more

As he entered today’s EU summit, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, made his first public comments about his unexpected plan for for “defensive” air-strikes against forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, saying they should be used in the event Gaddafi uses chemical weapons or unleashes airpower against unarmed demonstrators.

“The French and the English have said that we are open, if the United Nations wants it, and if the Arab League accepts it, and if the Libyan authorities that we want to be recognised ask for it, to have targeted defensive operations in the sole eventuality that Gaddafi would use chemical weapons or use his warplanes to target non-violent demonstrators,” he told reporters. Read more

Today’s back-to-back European Union summits in Brussels kick off with a discussion on Libya, and it’s sure to be dominated by Nicolas Sarkozy’s unexpected decision to recognise the opposition Libyan National Council as the legitimate representatives of the Libyan people.

Officials at both Nato (where defence ministers are meeting) and the European Union (where European foreign ministers lunched ahead of today’s heads-of-government summit) said Sarkozy’s initiative was not hugely popular; one foreign minister I talked to said it was 26 vs 1 during the EU session. There are widespread concerns about who, exactly, the west is embracing, since intelligence on the opposition’s leadership remails pretty thin. Read more

If MEPs cannot dump Strasbourg, once and for all, they may at least be able to spend a bit less time with her.

That seems to be the thinking behind the European Parliament’s vote on Wednesday to drop one of the 12 plenary sessions it holds each year in the Alsatian city that is the symbol of Franco-German reconciliation at the heart of the European project. In past years, the Parliament has held two Strasbourg sessions in September or October in order to make up for the summer recess. Pending a legal challenge, it will merge those sessions into one visit for the next two years. Read more

José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, announced he was sending the emergency relief commissioner, Kristalina Georgieva, to Tunisia Wednesday night to oversee the EU’s humanitarian aid effort to the growing refugee crisis along the Libyan border.

Your Brussels Blogger has been in Malta reporting on how southern Europe has been preparing for a possible flood of migrants fleeing Libya. Despite all the bluster, thus far the only two who have claimed asylum in Europe from Libya are the two defecting fighter pilots who flew over in their Mirage jets last week.

Why the exodus to Tunisia and not across the Mediterranean? Officials in Malta say the awful weather in the past week is the real reason why nobody has attempted the 400km journey from Libya.

As I explained in my story on Monday, it’s not fleeing Libyans that Europeans are most worried about. Their main concern relates to foreigners living in Libya, mostly from other parts of Africa, who might use the chaos to flee in Europe. Many hail from places like war-torn Somalia, which nearly automatically entitles them to some sort of protection as refugees if they reach Europe. Read more

The authors

Peter Spiegel is the FT's Brussels bureau chief. He returned to the FT in August 2010 after spending five years covering foreign policy and national security issues from Washington for the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, focusing on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He first joined the FT in 1999 covering business regulation and corporate crime in its Washington bureau, before spending four years covering military affairs and the defence industry in London and Washington.

Alex Barker is EU correspondent, covering the single market, financial regulation and competition. He was formerly an FT political correspondent in the UK and joined the FT in 2005.

Duncan Robinson is the FT's Brussels correspondent, covering internet and telecommunications regulation, justice, employment and migration as well as Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. He joined the FT from the New Statesman in 2011